Posted on 07/16/2015 5:54:45 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
More than 200,000 people will be diagnosed with lung cancer this year and almost 160,000 people will die from it.
Now, a drug that is showing incredible results in treating lung cancer has doctors more hopeful than ever.
Dr. Amita Patnaik says, "It truly is a transformative treatment."
Those are not words Dr. Patnaik uses lightly, but a clinical trial for treating lung cancer with the drug Keytruda has shown remarkable results.
"How have you been feeling?" she asks her patient.
Abelardo Torres has gone from being wheelchair bound and on oxygen full time, to an almost full recovery. Before the trial began, doctors were preparing his wife.
"Why don't you take him to hospices?" Abelardo remembers them saying.
However, after a year and a half of being treated with Keytruda, the tumors on his lungs and liver are virtually gone.
Cancer suppresses the immune system, but Keytruda blocks communication between cancer cells and certain proteins, allowing the immune system to kick in.
Dr. Patnaik, the Associate Director of Clinical Research at the START Center, explains, "This allows for our bodies to essentially mount natural anti-tumor immunity against cancer."
Scans of Abelardo's lungs show that the tumor used to obscure the lung, but now, after Keytruda, the lung is clear and the tumor is gone.
"He's had about a 97% reduction in the extent of his tumor, so the future for him looks very optimistic," explains Dr. Patnaik.
This new drug has taken Abelardo from near death to hopeful and is giving doctors a new tool to fight lung cancer.
"It truly is something that will change the way we practice and think about cancer," beams Dr. Patnaik
The FDA has assigned a priority review designation to Keytruda as a treatment for patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer and a final decision is expected in October.
Late last year, the FDA approved the use of Keytruda for treating melanoma.
Data suggests Keytruda could also be used for treating triple negative breast cancer, bladder, and kidney cancer.
Tests on these cancers are currently underway.
These drugs are gonna be expensive. Probably cost almost as much as HIV treatment...
i’m cautious. I basically heard the same thing about a malignant melanoma “cure” about six years ago, 99% reduction, no trace, and so on - but it couldn’t get to 100%, the cancer came back as some other genetic type, even more virulent.
Let’s suppose that it works. What will it cost? There is a hepatitis C cure that really does work most of the time; the bad news is that it’s about 100 grand.
Gee, that is something alternative medicine never knew. /s
This is for non small cell. They need one for the small cell lung cancer. That’s the bad one.
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I know this is going to sound strange, but I was wondering why I got a HUGE pack of files to translate from Japanese to English about *** Pharmaceuticals and their anti-PD-1 antibodies. I know a lot about this drug now, and I can see why they’re marketing it. I can’t get into specifics about lab tests, etc., but this treatment had been a long time coming and it is a TUMOR KILLER.
It can basically stop many types of cancers (mostly tumors) from exploiting the immune system with PD-1 antibodies that shut down the immune systems response to the tumor. It’s a fascinating drug, and may be one of the final steps toward the eradication of cancer.
and we’ll see it on about 20 yrs aster another million die from cancer.
“and we’ll see it on about 20 yrs aster another million die from cancer.”
They’ve got to loosen the rules on “fast-tracking” these things. There are a lot of people with nothing to lose.
True: My great aunt had an inoperable malignancy on her spine in the 50’s. Radiation was the “magical cure” then, but they didn’t know how much to use, she had nothing to lose, she signed some papers, and they treated her. They shot it so hard with cobalt-60 that it left a burn mark on the OTHER side of her body, and left a “pit” in her back that never healed. Really dangerous - but she lived another 45 years and died of extreme old age, so it was worth it.
My grade school teacher told me that the hospitals in Chicago tried out some radioactive therapies that were so nasty that the people that it didn’t cure had to be sealed in metal/lead water-tight caskets.
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These drugs are gonna be expensive.
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New hepatitis drugs are expensive, but they are less expensive than liver transplants and better for the patient.
I know of a great cure for lung cancer - DON’T SMOKE!!!!
“I know of a great cure for lung cancer - DON’T SMOKE!!!!”
A good number of people get lung cancer who never smoked a day in their lives. The wife of Christopher Reeves comes to mind. I had a relative who died of cirrhosis of the liver, who was a known tee-teetotaler from the time she was teen-age One of the reasons that she died was that she could not believe her own symptoms until the damage was done.
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The first two melanoma drugs came out about 6 years ago. One worked to buy about half of melanoma cases about 6 months, but then recurrence was expected. The other only worked in a third or a fourth, but produced some long term benefits. Both were notable because the older options for metastatic melanoma were pretty useless. The new 'check point' inhibitor drugs offer a higher response rate and longer duration of benefits. Encouragingly their benefits hadn't yet peaked in the early studies. This new class of drugs can be combined with the latter of the two older advances in melanoma and they seem to be useful in several other tumors, not just in melanoma. The responding tumor list is growing and small cell lung cancer may also be on it. Give the Oncologists a bit more time to learn how to optimize their use and melanoma will become another cancer for which Medical Oncology can offer more than paliation. But it will still be better, and less expensive, to catch melanoma before the Oncologist is needed, or to avoid getting it at all.
It’s a Merck product - I’ve got 800 shares. People will pay good money to get rid of their cancers.
The prices are usually knocked down by competition. When Gilead came out with the Hep C medication, they had a monopoly and wanted to charge $80K. Then Abbvie came out with one, and gave a deal for about $50K to big distributor. The next one that comes out will probably knock it to $30K.
My point being that gummint will pay...
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